Memnison Journal

• The best training: No, you can’t go to counterinsurgency training, you have to fight the insurgents.
• Military readiness: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reports that we can’t handle any other fighting, and it will take years to rebuild what we have.
• And the White House says: what readiness problem?
• This readiness and resource problem in, say, Afghanistan.
• Food safety is going to heck; the FDA’s enforcement is cut to ribbons.
• Hate the terrorist, keep his campaign contributions.
• And fire US Attorneys for cause - the cause being that they’re digging into our guys’ misfeasances, or we need to give Smedley our unqualified buddy a job. The link goes over the past history of such firings, and notes that it’s rare and almost always for real cause. Not this time.

• Happy birthday to Stephen Leigh!
• I think this whole ‘we got the bones of Christ’ stuff is ludicrous. James Cameron should do something more useful, like make a new, interesting movie about Zippy the Pinhead.
• How to hunt a deer - with a mountain howitzer. The aiming is the tough part…
• You’d think that people would know better than to live next door to a volcano, but nooooo.
• Nothing quite like impressing your readers: “Eng called himself an “Asian supremacist” in January in another installment of the column, which runs under the label “God of the Universe.”
  

Finally completed the evisceration of two of the four TiVos in the house; one goes off to Meredith’s sister’s family, and the other is in our bedroom. Both had had hard drive failures, which is common with TiVos after a year or two (it runs into a bad spot on the disk, doesn’t know what to do and flips out), and I decided that THIS time, I was going to do the repairs and install the new hard drives myself to learn the art, while saving the cash I would have paid another person for the fix (never mind the hours I spent on my own time figuring it out).

Rumsfeld wargaming a government disruption: But instead of working to re-establish a functioning US government in the aftermath of a massive disaster, Rumsfeld had other priorities.A former official at the time told Cockburn that Rumsfeld, “always tried to unleash the maximum amount of nuclear firepower possible,” in retaliation for a Soviet attack.

Having seen practically nothing in the Oscar set this year, aside of rooting for Helen Mirren, I got nothin.

• It was hard for me to dig that that was Jodi Foster until she opened her mouth and honked.
• I admit that someone at Price Waterhouse would have said - “It’s OK to have Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg up there presenting the Best Director award, and no, they’re not going to look stupid when they announce that someone they’ve never heard of gets it instead of Martin Scorsese, their old pal.”
• My MIL was thinking that Celine Dion was singing in French; no, I said, it’s English, but Celine’s vocal level is such that it all sounded like the neighbor’s basset hound gargling.

Aside of that, I refer you to the great job at snark at The Defamer.

All day long, I’ve felt really energy-less; very tired and draggy. Went to bed last night at 9, slept till 7:45 (with a upbreak at 5-6) and I’m still whomped.

My brain is suggesting that the general reason for this is that I’m seriously scared and depressed over this whole question as to What’s Wrong With Me, especially the CLL stuff. And I have been seriously tired and draggy for the last year or two, and the cold hives, etc. Perhaps this is all a symptom of the CLL. Or whatever it is.

Again, Connie is heavily pushing a feelgood positive message, and I have to admit that my natural depressiveness won’t help in this sort of a situation. And that my best bet in general is to treat myself well and stay as healthy and positive as possible, but it’s hard.

Spent a lot of the day looking into tech stuff - like setting up Oracle on my Linux side, and some stuff on Document Management systems to handle big piles of documents. 90% of this is for the office.

Not looking forward to going in tomorrow.

I put private posts on here for two reasons; one, because I see some news article or whatnot that I want to hang on to in e-format, and it’s longish and copyrighted, and it’s simpler to put behind the ‘wall’ but make it something that I can go to later. Or two, it’s because I want to get something off my chest and I don’t want the whole world to see it.

One example of that last bit would be something where I’m blowing off steam about something that upsets me; another would be something out of the darkest fears of my heart. A third might be something that was meant for the future for my family but - well, it’s a little much for the rest of the world to see.

I really haven’t done much of the personal-private stuff before now; but regardless of what the test results on the CLL/whatever are next week, I’m going to do a lot more.

Part of it also is for Mere - stuff to leave for her in the future. I love her so much, and there’s so much I want to give her - and this is the best way I can think of to do it. (Which means, of course, she has to be able to see it and want to see it. As I was going on through the whole ‘how long can digital media last’ thing, I realize that in 40-50 years, regardless, I’ll be dead and the stuff I treasure is going to be in the laps of Someone Else, probably Mere, to do with as she pleases. I know that going through my Mom’s stuff is tough from the direction of ‘well, this meant a lot to her but not so much to me’, and that the quick reaction is to toss it all. If it means nothing to Mere, that’s what will happen, and I’d rather it did mean something to her. )

• AIR FILTERS: every season, possibly more in heavy use or dusty periods.
• COMPUTERS: at least every four years; operating systems and demands change and the stuff wears out.
• FIRE EXTINGUISHERS: ten years
• MATTRESSES: five to seven years.
• PILLOWS: Two years
• SMOKE ALARMS: ten years, but check batteries every season.
• SPICES: one year
• TOOTHBRUSHES: Three to six months.

My main GP sent me up for further blood tests because of a raised while cell count, and then referred me over to a hematologist, Dr. Barton? Had an appointment with him at noon that took two hours, and he looked me over and took a history, and ordered some blood tests.

He said that there were a higher number of lymph cells in the whites, and he was concerned as to what this meant. He said that there were a bunch of possible causes, but that the top two for him were CLL and some sort of messy reaction to chronic infections.

CLL is a chronic lympho-whatever leukemia. According to him, one can live for a long time - 20-30 years - with it; it’s not an immediate death sentence. However, it requires at best steady monitoring and plenty of preventative work on immunizations and such…I believe Scott Raun has it (Minneapolis fan on LJ), and there are curative things that can be done. Normally, they don’t fool with chemo unless the levels of crap cells get out of hand.

He stressed that he didn’t know anything for sure, and that the new tests and some observations of the actual cell morphology would tell him more. I’m to be back in a week for the results on that.

Needless to say, I’m pretty shaken. I was expecting the infective stuff to be the culprit, and for all anyone knows, that’s still a big possibility. In which case, that filleting thing on my butt sounds to be a big likelihood, because I can’t imagine how else to control the chronic reinfections. But Leukemia - man.

This is obviously going to screw with next Wednesday’s meetings on web stuff, but frankly, my health trumps that easily. This post is staying secret - only Susan, Connie and I know about this, and I have no interest in going off about it at all. Especially not to Mere. I will be overjoyed to hear that it’s something far less serious, believe me, but I also want to record my thoughts, for the record.

It also focuses me on making sure that the legal stuff and whatnot is taken care of ASAP - will, living will, readoption and other legal crud on Mere, all that. Even if this is something lesser, I’m not interested in holding that stuff off any further. Susan may be more laissez-faire on it, but I’m not.

I mean, either or both of us could be hit by a bus tomorrow and we’d still have these problems.

Connie, of course, is Ms. Positive Thinking. You were set up to be here for Mere, and you and she have a long way to go on that. I sure want to believe that.

A couple of weeks ago, our mailbox was knocked all to heck and gone by - well, something.

As we Save Ulster From Sodomy, we need to reflect on these items:

• “For a brief moment yesterday, Scooter Libby was not a former White House aide on trial for perjury. He was an orphan in need of a loving home.“
• Now the people in Pastor Ted Haggard’s church are coming forward about his ‘dark side’ that they knew about all along.  I especially liked this line: “These findings established a pattern of behavior that culminated in the final relationship in which Ted was, as a matter of grace, caught.”
• If you haven’t checked out the whole story (mostly in the Washington Post) about the mess at Walter Reed Hospital and the treatment of rehabbing injured Iraq war veterans, do so.  And notice the reactions of the people in authority - either denying it, or saying who cares, or trying frantically to clean things up.  To me, it says volumes  about how much the people in power over the military gave a damn about ’supporting the troops’.  It’s not something different and new; it’s part of a whole picture about using them like gamepieces on a board, and not bothering to think about them as human beings.
• Similarly, it’s painful to watch McCain wildly veer from mavericity to suckupery, where one day he lauds the people in power, and the next day, goes off about how they’re incompetent boobs.  Bush isn’t the only person in DC to be working hard on reducing his own credibility.
• A legend in his own mind.  George Washington, who had gravitas and never-told-a-lie, and George W., who has the gravitas of a frat boy on pledge night, and can’t-tell-the-truth or doesn’t-know-the-difference.  Take your pick, but it’s upchuck city.
• Brain glitches from Tom Tomorrow.

Yes, I worked to elect the guy, but I got better.  (youtube)

Susan has a number of these collected on her YouTube area.  Look for the ones done in the last few days; older ones than that are her stuff on our dogs.  (There’s only 10 videos in all, so it’s not a long list.)

Also, if you want a quick look at the early photos from the visit, check out the most recent stuff in her Flickr site.  I’ll have more up today or tomorrrow.

Unfortunately, we won’t be having our usual Oscar party here next weekend, due to just simple overload.  I have to specifically contact people, but the bam-bam-bam of weekend events here at the Marmotage has caused severe burnout on the part of - well, everyone.  The Thursday through Monday Sissy-visit went well, but was pretty exhausting, and that was following Capricon, the Animal Communication stuff in Minnesota and so on.  We’re all wiped.

It doesn’t hurt that this year’s Oscar crop is probably the most disappointing in a while.  We’ve only seen THE QUEEN out of the Best Picture noms and aren’t revved up to see anything else.

A sissy-visit is underway here; for a good example of how they look, check out this link and tell me which is which.

http://gallery.memnison.com/v/comparison/